Day 14 of 31 days to Creating Your Inspiring Personal Plan for 2012
I am delighted to be hearing about empowering Vision statements that participants have created. Through Twitter and Facebook direct messages, some participants have been sharing the personal Vision statements that they have crafted over the last week and then polished in Step 13. As promised in the last step, if you would like to see my Vision statement, email me yours. (Connect with me on either Facebook or Twitter and request the email for your send. Doing so will not add you to any mailing list; I am using the exchange offer solely as a means to give participants a little added motivation to complete their Vision statement. If I just posted mine, some would be tempted to just read it and not get on with actually writing their own Vision statement.)
Remember, as I explained yesterday, because of the sheer number of participants in this process, I will not be able to offer suggestions on improving your statement. But, hopefully my vision statement will help you to continue to polish yours. My personal Vision statement is not returned to you by auto-responder so please be patient as to how quickly I return mine to you. (If you haven’t received mine within 48 hours, please resend yours. Also, be sure to first check your spam box since I will not have been white listed by you and my email to you may get caught in your spam filters.) Email me your Vision statement to obtain your copy of mine as yet another tool to polish yours.
With your Vision statement in hand, you are now ready to move on to creating strategies for accelerating success in making your Vision become your current reality. One of my favorite mantras is:
Dream it.
Plan it.
Then, just do it!
For one solid week, I will be working with you to create the strategies that will enable you to turn the Vision statement that you find empowering into an accurate statement of how you are living your life. In the next six steps, I will show you how to generate fresh ideas on strategies that can accelerate your success. Then, on the seventh day, you will choose from among the many possible strategies to select the five or six that you are most excited about pursuing.
The key to getting the most from this process is to really, really open you mind up to new approaches to accelerating your success. The most empowering Vision statement will be worth little if you choose to implement it by just continuing to do the same “old things.” In today’s step and that of the next five sessions, I need you to brainstorm. Set aside your judgment as to what you can do, what you have the resources to do, etc. Your task for this week is to surface some great potential ideas on things you can do to accelerate the speed at which your empowering Vision becomes a statement of how you are currently living your life.
In today’s step and in the next five steps, I will be sharing with you a new methodology, each day, for surfacing powerful strategies. Write down every idea that comes from the process this week. Resist the temptation to judge the ideas as you will get to do that in the seventh session.
This is the essence of possibility thinking. Open your mind to strategies that are at least possible for you.
Over my years of helping mentees with development of their plans, most have found these next steps liberating. Freed up of the constraints of what one has been doing, one is able to create the kind of fresh thinking that has the potential to create powerful new breakthroughs and accelerate success for you.
Today, we will be using the “Gap Analysis” method to brainstorm new strategies. Gap Analysis is a process successfully used in most corporate planning and it can work equally well for you. In its simplest form, Gap Analysis involves looking at the difference between two positions. For this process, I want you to use GAP analysis and compare your current position with the position you have defined as your Vision. Identify the gaps, i.e., where your current position is different from your vision.
For each Gap that you identify, identify at least one strategy that you could implement that would eliminate the Gap. For example, some of you have shared with me that an important element of your Vision statement is to be well known so that your work will have a major impact. If you are currently not well known, but aspire to be well known, then that is a gap. If such is the case, then one strategy for you might be to “leverage the power of social media to dramatically increase the proportion of my target audience that knows of my work.”
Note that the example that I have provided is not yet down to the “next step” level. Like the Vision creation process, we need to stay at the so called “40,000 foot level.” Next week, you will convert the strategies into 2012 Goals. For this week, please stay strategic.
Using Gap Analysis, identify and write down at least five strategies that you might use to eliminate the gap between your current reality and your Vision statement. Again, don’t judge the feasibility of your being able to successfully implement the strategy. Just get at least five strategies down on paper. You will be using other processes throughout the week to build on this initial five. By day seven, you will have written down two dozen potential strategies that will then, and only then, be narrowed down to five or six strategies that will become your primary focus for 2012.
So, go start getting liberated. 
Write down at least five possible strategies that flow out of your Gap Analysis. In step 15 (as well as in Steps 16-19), I will introduce you to another method for generating possible strategies.
When you have completed Step 14, you can access Step 15 here. If you want an anouncement every time a new step is posted, you can sign-up – to the right – to receive new steps by either RSS feed or email.
Please note: If you have arrived at this step first, it is not too late for you to join other high performers who are collaborating to follow the bite size steps that are unveiled here every day. Get started here.
This blog post was written by Dave Carpenter. Dave is a prolific author, inspiring speaker, and well-known consultant to professional service firms. Besides writing regularly for this blog, Dave’s writing can be seen in leading business and personal development publications. Dave is also the leader of the Accelerate Success mentoring program where he mentors high performers in a unique program designed to do great things for the favorite charity of each participant. If you are (1) a high performer who believes you still have untapped potential, and (2) passionate about a favorite charity, you may want to learn more about this powerful program. You can also follow Dave on Twitter, on Facebook, and/or on Google+.
